


Herald of Spring

by Syrena_of_the_lake



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Age of Winter (Narnia), Gen, Minor Character(s), Talking Animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 10:28:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20445638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrena_of_the_lake/pseuds/Syrena_of_the_lake
Summary: In all the stories, a robin is always the first sign of spring. But the stories are wrong in one respect: it was both a robin and a crow who first knew that the Witch's winter was broken, even before the thaw began.





	1. Bare boughs in winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marmota_b](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marmota_b/gifts).

> Dear Marmota, this story is most especially for you. I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> And another heartfelt thank you to [redacted until reveals] for beta reading — and for encouraging me to write the story I wanted to write.

**Prologue**

_"The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless […]) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don't. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart."_   
\- Czech journalist Karel Hvížd’ala, _Disturbing the Peace_

_"Hope is the thing with feathers—  
__That perches in the soul—"_  
\- Emily Dickinson

"I tell you, spring is at hand!" 

The thicket resounded with the robin's cry. Amid the bare brambles, the other songbirds greeted the triumphant pronouncement as they always had before: with mingled indifference and scorn.

"Give over," sighed a chubby junco. "Your sort has been saying that for a hundred years. Spring hasn't come yet, has it?" The slate-gray bird returned to pecking at the frozen ground.

Nadeja the robin puffed up her feathers indignantly. "Gloomy grump," she chirped in a huff. "Just because you don't believe in anything but winter—"

"Peace, Friends," sighed a thrush. "Haven't we enough problems without fighting among ourselves?"

"I'm not fighting!" Nadeja protested. "I was just saying—"

"Spring, we know." The thrush sighed wearily. “You’ve been saying that for months, and I don’t see any melt.”

This wasn’t strictly accurate. Even in Narnia’s eternal winter, there were seasons of sorts — if you knew what to look for. The bone-chilling cold and dry sparkling snow of winter-winter were different than the ice storms and driving sleet of autumn-winter, and different again from the relatively mild temperatures and heavy wet snows of spring-winter.

But by now, every bird in the Beaversdam wood knew Nadeja wasn’t talking about wetter snowfalls. She always meant _true_ spring.

And like the proverbial rabbit-kit that cried _wolf_, the more Nadeja sang of spring, the less anyone listened. 

Even her own mate, Perrut, refused to believe her. "It's no use getting folks' hopes up," he remonstrated softly. It was his favorite refrain, and it rankled.

"I know," she sighed, rather than argue again. It was hard enough keeping her own hopes up, and she _knew_ — every hollow bone in her body vibrated with the knowledge that spring was near. Still, the interminable cold and endless expanses of snow could depress even the cheeriest robin, let alone a gray-spirited, gray-feathered gloomy grump of a junco. They were such... _winter_ birds!

And as for Perrut… his silence hurt more than the rest of them combined. Weren’t robins supposed to be the first to know when spring was near? Nadeja's throat ached with the song she could not sing.

Because songs of spring were never meant to be sung alone.

Nadeja pecked determinedly at the bare ground the squirrels had been kind enough to clear for them earlier. She pried a beetle loose from the permafrost — with most of its legs intact, for a wonder — and returned to her nest. She left the junco’s doubt and despair behind where they belonged: with the cold, barren ground and a single frozen beetle leg. 

Perrut may be snowblind like the rest of them, but Nadeja held onto thoughts of warmth she had never felt, and blooming flowers she had never seen. 

Her nest would not be empty for long. Nadeja couldn’t afford _not_ to hope for spring.

* * *

**Chapter I. Bare boughs in winter**

"_In Winter the bare boughs that seem to sleep work covertly, preparing for their spring."  
_\- Rumi

_"__It is a serious thing   
__just to be alive   
__on this fresh morning   
__in this broken world."_  
\- Mary Oliver, "Invitation"

"_I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.   
__Also in singing, especially when singing   
__is not necessarily prescribed._"  
\- Mary Oliver

One Winter morn, a Robin laid an egg.

It may seem a strange thing to happen during winter, but of course this was no ordinary winter. It was the Witch's Winter in Narnia, and some said it had lasted for one hundred years. Others asked how anyone could count years without the passing of seasons to mark them by, to which still others replied that just because _some_ had no head for numbers didn't mean that _others_ could not count the moons, at which point still others said they should just ask the Centaurs and be done with it, except of course that no one had seen any Centaurs about since the Witch first came… approximately one hundred years ago.

Narnians, as you might already know, love to squabble among themselves. Birds more so than most.

Our story starts with one such Bird: a humble robin who laid an egg.

Now, she was not the first Narnian bird to lay an egg in Winter, or there would have been no Narnian birds after one hundred years (more or less). But nesting was difficult, and it was even harder to keep the eggs warm until they hatched, and even harder still to provide for the shivering, hungry chicks.

Eggs were a blessing and a burden, to be celebrated in hushed voices — and even then only among the dense branches of a tree you could trust.

Nadeja the robin knew this. She had learned it from her mother, along with ways to peck and poke at the hard ground for seed, insect eggs and the rare earthworm, and how to fluff her feathers and constantly shift her feet on the coldest days to keep from freezing to her perch. Nadeja knew these things in her light, thin bones.

But she could not keep from singing.

* * *

Kirrik the crow was the first of his murder to see trouble cracking its shell.

He watched the bright-breasted robin flit around her nest, her plumage too easily spotted against the snow-covered branches. "Pipe down," he scolded from his lofty perch. Songbirds. Such a racket.

Then the robin's fool mate began trilling and fluffing his feathers, and Kirrik began to grow nervous. Not that it was any of his concern. But noise drew notice, and that was something Kirrik had learned to fear.

He never had time to call a second warning.

The sleigh traveled without bells, a sure sign that _She_ was in the mood to catch some poor beast and turn it to stone. She collected those statues like a crow kept shiny things. Even as the comparison occurred to Kirrik, it sickened him.

The crow knew the moment the Witch heard the birdsong. He saw her head jerk, her pet dwarf's hands tighten on the reins, the sleigh coast to a halt.

He hopped down to a lower branch.

"Psst!" Gryke, an older and warier crow hunkered close to the trunk of a black spruce. His feathers were dull for lack of nourishment, but they blended well with the tufts of dark needles. "Get scarce."

Kirrik blinked to show he heard but drifted lower still, until he could hear _Her_ speak.

"What is that noise?"

Kirrik had seen trees encased in ice crack and explode from the pressure of their own freezing, expanding sap. He thought his own blood might still in his veins at the sound of _Her_ voice.

The fool robins never heard it.

He saw her furs stir, her pale arm lift. He saw sunlight glint off the wand — the first and only shiny thing he had never coveted. He saw a flash of red and brown fluttering gaily among the brambles of an indifferent dogwood. He saw the Witch's bloodless lips part.

And then Kirrik cawed. Loudly, desperately, and startlingly close to the Witch's ear.

Too late, the birdsong stopped.

Kirrik threw himself to the side just in time to dodge a blast of magic so strong it made his feathers stiff. He careened clumsily through the trees, knowing _She_ had him in her sights—

And then the murder rose as one, a noisy shifting mass of crows flapping and cawing and screeching into the stillness. They caught him up in their midst, wheeled and dispersed into the darker, friendlier trees.

The Witch watched them escape. She turned calmly and uttered a single word. An unnatural hush fell over the wood. A young, berry-red branch cracked under a sudden weight. A smattering of small, egg-shaped stones fell to the ground.

Too late, much too late, the robins were silent.

* * *

Word spread quickly through the wood in hushed, mournful chirrups: the robin hen would not leave her nest.

The cock robin had left, some said. Others said he too had been turned to stone. But others adamantly maintained that he'd stayed, feeding his forlorn mate in silence from the small cache of seeds they'd lain by for their chicks.

Not a sound had been heard from the dogwood since the stone eggs had thudded to the ground.

Kirrik wanted the robins to leave. Forced to take shelter in a stunted juniper bush, he remained prisoner of his too-heavy bones and stiff wings. His mind felt numb, but everything else ached with cold. He pecked at the ground like a common starling, too weak to follow the wolves to hunt like the ravens and his own murder of crows did. So he did not hear the news about the wolf pack the Witch had turned to stone, or about the single pup who'd escaped. Nor did he hear about the band of Black Dwarves who emerged from their mines to join the Witch. Kirrik heard none of this news, for though songbirds were fearful gossips, they paid scant attention beyond their own kind. Their small worlds began and ended at the tips of their branches. For weeks, all Kirrik heard was how the little robin hen would not leave her nest. And the more the songbirds twittered their pity, the more irritable Kirrik grew.

The other crows dropped morsels for him from above, occasionally shouting encouragement or good-natured insults. They never stopped to land. Kirrik was not offended; he was a crow. He got himself in this fix, and he would have to get himself out. The others would see that he wouldn't starve in the meantime, but crows did not coddle.

Alone, Kirrik slowly stretched his wings. He hopped in ever-widening circles. He felt his muscles gradually unclenching, his feathers softening with every day that passed since the Witch's near miss. And every day, he cursed the unseen, unheard robins for their foolishness.

"_Now_ they're quiet," he grumbled to himself. "What good does it do now?"

Some days he only muttered his displeasure, but more often than not his harsh words echoed in the little glen until even the songbirds took notice. His hoarse cries competed with their shrill twitters in a racket that would surely have drawn the Witch's ire had she been passing by, but the robins remained silent and still in the dogwood.

Kirrik abused them soundly in their absence, hoping to provoke the foolish little hen into emerging to scold him, or to apologize. Or thank him. Or make any sound at all.

But when a robin did appear, it was not the little hen whose song had caused so much trouble. It was the cock robin, who did not even bother introducing himself, let alone apologize.

"I'm leaving," he announced. "Starting over."

Kirrik clacked his beak. "About time you two left."

"Not two," the little bird huffed. "One. Me."

Kirrik's beak fell open. His ruff rose. "You're leaving your nest _and_ your mate?" He'd been told that songbirds were fickle creatures, but the cock robin's callousness made Kirrik's pinfeathers prickle.

"No sense in staying."

Lurching to his feet, Kirrik loomed over the robin. "You'd leave your mate to die along with your eggs?"

The robin flinched. "She won't leave them. She still sits on them. They're nothing but stone and too heavy to move so she just sits on them where they fell! She says they'll hatch in spring, but spring is never coming. I'm leaving before I turn to stone myself from waiting."

"What will happen to her without you?" demanded Kirrik. "Who will feed her, who will protect her?"

"Maybe she'll leave," said the robin, his voice dull with doubt. "Maybe a dumb fox will swallow the rocks and she'll finally leave. Maybe she won't. But I'm not waiting another hundred years of Winter to find out. There are other robins, other nests."

"So what are you doing here?" rasped Kirrik.

The robin shifted his feet uncomfortably. "I just thought someone ought to know." As abruptly as a crow, the cock robin turned his back and flew away without another word.

In a flurry of motion, the eavesdropping songbirds dispersed before Kirrik could attempt to order any of them about. Not that he had any illusions; the juncos, jays and finches may lament her sad fate to anyone who would listen, but they would make no sacrifices to help a nestless neighbor. And crows only took care of their own.

Cursing, Kirrik hopped across the snow, floundering when the crust gave way. One awkward step at a time, he grumbled the whole way to the other side of the glen. This was what came of meddling with featherbrained songbirds, he told himself. This was why a crow always minded his own business, unless there was something in it for him.

On firmer ground, Kirrik stalked up to the dogwood. He was going to put an end to this nonsense once and for all. And if the robin hen uttered so much as a cheep of protest, Kirrik vowed, he was going to knock her pretty little head over tailfeathers into a snowbank. Just let her sing about _that_.

But then he saw the broken twigs, the scattered tufts of fur lining blown loose from the nest, and the bright-breasted little robin huddled atop a snow-covered heap of round stones, and Kirrik's voice failed him.

Snow hissed through the brittle grasses and trees creaked in the deepening cold. Neither bird made a sound as night fell around them.


	2. Birds of a feather

"_Each has to enter the nest made by the other imperfect bird."_  
\- Rumi

_“The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is.”_   
\- Czech journalist Karel Hvížd’ala, _Disturbing the Peace_

"_Tell me about despair, yours,  
__and I will tell you mine.  
__Meanwhile the world goes on."_  
\- Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

* * *

The first dawn of his vigil over the Robin’s nest, Kirrik woke to discover that he was sitting on several hard lumps. Bemused, he twisted his neck to look. Three little stone eggs were nestled underneath him. Surprisingly, they were warm, as if they had been sitting out in the sun. He didn't think his own body could generate heat like that, not since his close brush with the Witch's spell.

Had the robin rolled her eggs beneath him during the night?

“It is so good you are here!” The voice was very faint, with a rasp more fitting to a crow than a robin, but it startled a squawk out of Kirrik all the same. In his rapt contemplation of the eggs, he had not heard her approach. 

“What—? How did you—? Why?” Kirrik puffed up his feathers to look intimidating. (Not at all because it would trap a little more heat beneath him.)

The robin flitted around, tucking feathers and brittle grasses beneath Kirrik. They poked his tender underbelly and he squawked again in outrage. “I am Nadeja," she chirped, so softly Kirrik had to strain to hear her. "I know your name, I heard the chickadees talking about you. You are the one who cawed when he should have stayed silent."

Kirrik almost forgot himself entirely at that point, but the robin kept talking.

"We are very much alike that way, aren't we?" She paused, probably for breath, and seemed to shrink in on herself. "We do not know when to be silent."

Kirrik wondered whether she was constitutionally incapable of keeping her beak shut. _Birds of a feather_, he thought in self-disgust. 

Nadeja shook herself. "It is good you are here," she repeated, more confidently this time. "Now you can sit on the eggs while I fetch us some food. Perrut — my mate — was not patient. He used up all our store of seeds on me and never bothered refilling it. That is the first thing to do.” She bobbed her head, and the splash of red across her breast flashed in the sun. “The chicks will be oh so hungry when they hatch!” 

With that she flew away, leaving the dumbfounded crow sitting on the robin’s stone eggs, beak agape. His first uncharitable thought was this: Oh how the murder would _laugh_.

* * *

A week later, and Kirrik was still sitting on the infernal eggs.

The days passed in a bewildering mix of silence and chatter. Some days Nadeja seemed to lose her voice altogether; other days, she kept a running commentary on every wingbeat, every thought that fluttered through her head, all in that sad little voice that sounded nothing like birdsong. 

Kirrik had many things to say to the robin who had caused so much grief (true, the Lion's share was her own), but somehow he never got around to saying them. On Nadeja's talkative days he could hardly get a word in edgewise. As for the silent days... well, somehow all his scoldings always dried up in his throat when he looked at her, huddled atop her pathetic nest on the ground, likely losing more body heat to the stone eggs than she could afford to give. 

Between the silence and his own stifled internal monologue, it took Kirrik an embarrassingly long time to realize that he had mistaken the robin's character entirely.

At first, he had assumed the foolish bird had stayed behind with her stone eggs out of pure grief — a mother's despair, a lack of the will to live. Nadeja had cured him of that assumption the first morning, when she forced him to sit on her own eggs in a display of cunning worthy of a crow. Had her eggs been made of anything but stone, his weight would have crushed them immediately. As it was, they were safe from his too-heavy body and his blundering care. 

Kirrik was acutely conscious of the irony.

His next assumption was that Nadeja had quite simply lost her mind. She would not be the first bird to go dumb — voiceless and dull-witted like the beasts of the borderlands in tales of old. Indeed, a crow from his own rookery had once dashed herself against the frozen river chasing a phantom bird she said she had seen speeding under the ice. It had been a pike, Kirrik was sure, or maybe the shadow of a soaring eagle high above. But Kirrik knew better than most how the endless depths of winter could affect a bird. By the Lion's mane, his own spirits were suffering enough since he'd been confined so low to the ground. What he wouldn't give to stretch his wings and look down on the treetops again…!

Nadeja's ramblings only lent further credence to his theory that she had gone snowblind, or winter-mad. While Kirrik rested (and nested), the robin hen foraged, and she stockpiled food like a squirrel. Oh, she gave generously enough to Kirrik and twittered about helping him get his strength back, but she ate scarcely enough to keep herself alive. The rest, she explained, was for the chicks.

She inspected the eggs daily. "See?" she would say, drawing his attention to each perfect ovoid in turn. "One, two, three, all unblemished. They did not crack from the fall. How lucky they were stone before they hit the ground!" 

Kirrik would not have called it luck.

"When spring comes, they may yet hatch," Nadeja insisted stubbornly on the increasingly rare occasions when Kirrik expressed his doubt.

He fell into the habit of silent acquiescence when she began prattling about spring hatching, believing it was kinder to let her take comfort in her delusion. But even as the robin's small hoard grew, she herself grew thinner, and Kirrik found himself inventing strange tricks and schemes to convince her to eat.

He could be forgiven, he thought later, for believing her to be mad. Who could have imagined the robin would starve herself over frozen eggs out of _hope_?

* * *

"Eat," Kirrik said, shoving a branch of holly berries at her. "These won't last," he added before Nadeja could object. "So you may as well eat them yourself."

"What about you?" she whispered.

"I've had my fill." Kirrik turned his back so Nadeja would not catch the lie in his eyes. "If you want my help putting the eggs back, you'll have to eat first. I can't carry rocks and you too."

It was Nadeja's latest madness. Kirrik would allow that she had not completely taken leave of her senses, and that she was likely just as sane as he was… which wasn't saying much. After all, _he_ was the one to caw in the Witch's ear, and he still couldn't fly more than a few feet without being weighed back to earth by his own bones. It made the idea of returning the stone eggs to their original nest even more ludicrous.

"How will you keep them from falling through the nest?" he asked rudely. "I wager you didn't build it strong enough to keep rocks in."

Nadeja didn't even flinch. "I will build a new nest. You can help me.”

"I can't." Kirrik had done almost all his foraging on foot. Except for the holly berries; he had gone straight to the dryad for that branch, and he was certain her pity had not been meant for him. 

Regardless, he was still a crow who couldn't fly.

"You'll have to try sometime," said Nadeja. The confounded songbird had a way of making impossibilities sound reasonable.

Still, he felt… lighter… when she was nearby. Almost warm. He didn't even mind the way she maneuvered him into turning the eggs every hour so they would stay uniformly warm. Kirrik was under no illusions that it would make any difference, but he had insisted on turning them himself after watching Nadeja strain her small, frail body against the solid stone, her wings fluttering and her feet scrabbling for purchase in the snow.

Her eyes were bright when she thanked him. "I know you don't see the point in it."

She was right, but not even a crow would be so tactless as to say so. "It's no trouble," Kirrik said instead.

"Yes it is," Nadeja chirped. "And you do it anyway. Because you have hope that spring is on the way."

Kirrik busied himself arranging the eggs to keep from scoffing in her face. "I do it because it's important to you," he said, managing not to add _featherbrain_ as he carefully nudged the smallest egg into place with his beak.

Hope had died decades ago, along with spring. It was nothing more than foolish songbird talk. Crows were too practical for that sort of thing.

"You really believe they're going to hatch, don't you?" The question burst from him like a startled hare from a snowbank.

For once, Nadeja held perfectly still. "You always have to believe your eggs will hatch," she said carefully, "even though you know some won’t. Even before the winter, they say, not all eggs opened. But you have to believe they will, or what's the point of sitting on them?"

Their eyes met. Kirrik was the first to look away.

"I believe my eggs _could_ hatch." She preened a stray pinion in Kirrik's wing. He didn’t have to look at it to know it was one of the ones blighted by the Witch’s magic, fledgling-gray and stone-stiff. He avoided looking at those feathers as much as possible. 

"I believe it," repeated Nadeja forcefully, drawing his attention back to her, “just like I believe you _could_ fly again. I can't explain it. I just know winter doesn't make sense without spring, and eggs don't make sense without a hatching, and a bird doesn't make sense without flying."

_I believe in you_, Kirrik thought but couldn't quite bring himself to say.

Knowing Nadeja, she probably heard him anyway. 

"You can't build another nest in the dogwood," Kirrik said instead. "Its branches are too thin. You'll have to find a sturdier tree."

He had to say one thing for her: Nadeja never gloated. She just bobbed her little brown head and flew off to scout a new nesting site.

She left a telltale imprint behind in the snow. Kirrik sighed. Wary she might be, but the little songbird didn’t have the canniness to dust her own trail, to obscure the wingmarks that might point the direction of her flight.

His eyes followed her bright red breast as she flitted from tree to tree. Kirrik would have to approve the site, of course, he groused to himself. With her luck, the robin would pick one of the Witch's dryad spies instead of a nice steady spruce — or better yet, a stilled tree that couldn't betray anyone. He assumed he would need to caution her, but he watched with approval and no small amount of surprise as she flew first to a densely needled fir he had long trusted — two rarities in one.

By nature, Kirrik knew robins should love open spaces ringed by trees, but generations of birds raised in winter had bred a new wariness in the friendly little creatures. It was one thing for a crow to be mistrustful, but a robin? Kirrik snapped his beak angrily. Perhaps it was the least of the Witch’s many crimes, but that did not make it any less wrong.

Across the glen, a slender aspen creaked. Kirrik froze. There was no breeze, and the cold was less biting than it could have been. Was it one of _her_ trees, stretching its limbs to better sense the birds’ activities?

A thin warble of birdsong echoed through the glen. Kirrik was in the air and headed for open sky before he knew what he was doing. Startled, he squawked and dove back down to the nest. He spread his wings out and gaped at them. Glossy black, with the shimmers of iridescent purples and blues and greens that only another crow could see. Not a trace of granite gray.

When had _that_ happened?

Nadeja repeated her soft trill. This time, Kirrik's brain caught up with his reflexes: that was no call of alarm. It sounded… proud?

He followed her voice to — what else — the holly who had bequeathed the gift of her berries. Even Kirrik could not fault the choice. Hollies had a reputation for sheltering little birds from winter storms, and this one had already proven herself a friend.

Nadeja ­­waited for him on a branch that was close to the trunk, not low enough to be within sight or easy reach of most two- or four-leggers, but low enough to be in dense cover.

He landed on a branch just above the robin and glared down at her accusingly. "I suppose you'll say you knew this was going to happen."

Nadeja craned her head to look at him. "I'd never say that." Her eyes danced. "But I did hope for it."

Kirrik shook himself, head to tailfeathers, dislodging a shower of snow onto Nadeja below him. She fluffed her feathers and watched him with the indulgent eye of a mother hen.

"I suppose you think this means I can carry your eggs for you now," Kirrik grumbled.

There was only a trace of smugness in her reply. "It will certainly be easier."

(She was right about that, too.)

* * *

The morning after the move, Kirrik woke first. This was highly unusual — Nadeja was an early riser even for a robin — but even she could not triumph over physical exhaustion.

Kirrik left her nestled atop her eggs, with a quick murmured word for the holly dryad to keep a careful eye on the new nest. His conscience clear, he took flight.

It was _so good_ to feel air beneath his wings, to look down on the wintry landscape from on high instead of being a reluctant part of it, to be alone with his thoughts with no meddlesome songbirds or dryads or unseen witch’s spies lurking in the undergrowth.

He needed to think.

For a terrible thought had slipped into Kirrik’s mind like a snake — an instinctive thought in itself, for it had been a full century since it had last been warm enough for snakes to slither about swallowing eggs.

It all came back to the eggs.

What if Nadeja was wrong? What if winter lasted another hundred years, or a thousand? Her eggs would be forgotten, buried in snow, forever unchanging like the rest of Narnia.

Kirrik acknowledged that eventuality with the fatalism of his kind: in that unwelcome but not unlikely scenario, there was nothing to be done, and so there could be nothing to worry about. 

Then: What if Nadeja was right? What if spring came and stone thawed? Even if such a miracle were to happen, there was nothing to guarantee that either bird would be alive to see it. Kirrik could hardly be expected to found a dynasty of crow guards to sit on rocks in the hopes that motherless robin chicks might someday hatch. Just what exactly did Nadeja expect him to do?

(_Turn them_, Kirrik’s thoughts supplied in answer, in a suspiciously cheerful singsong voice sounding nothing like his own. _Turn them every hour so they don’t heat unevenly._)

“How long?” he asked himself savagely. He spiraled high over the Lantern Waste. “How long are we supposed to wait for something that might never come?” 

It wasn’t only about the eggs, after all.

_As long as you can_, the singsong voice whispered in his mind. _What have you to lose, except time?_

Kirrik was suddenly tired of being alone with his thoughts. He tucked his wings and dove.

He landed at the edge of the river, not far from a dam built by some enterprising beaver. He paced back and forth on the ice, then flew to a broken cedar on the bank. Then he saw the statues.

A badger crouched low, frozen for eternity with fear on his face. Someone had draped a soft brown scarf around his shoulders. It was not stone, but rather was knit from yarn the color of granite. If Kirrik had not seen the morning light catch in the soft threads, he never would have known.

“It’s so he won’t be so cold, you see.” The quiet voice came from the empty ice behind him. Startled, Kirrik flared his wings, ready to fly. 

But it was only one of the beavers, poking its head out of a hidey-hole in the rocks. 

“He was my husband’s best friend,” explained the she-beaver. “There wasn’t anything else...” She twisted her paws anxiously. “I just didn’t want him to be cold.”

“Everyone is cold,” snapped Kirrik, still unnerved and irritated with himself for it. “It’s winter. And _he_ is _stone —_ he doesn’t feel anything.” Kirrik’s beak clacked shut a moment too late.

The beaver drew herself up. “No one knows what they feel, do they?” she sniffed. “Maybe a little warmth helps. I can’t move him under shelter, he’s too big and heavy and I wouldn’t want to risk breaking him. But I can knit.”

Kirrik opened his beak and spared a moment to hope that whatever came out would sound more like Nadeja’s gentle words than his own clumsy ones. “I think I can break off that branch at the top of the cedar,” he found himself saying. “Dryad’s gone and the wood’s rotted, should be easy enough. That’ll let a little more light down here. Even stone gets warm in the sun. Holds the heat well, too.”

Now _there_ was an idea...

Before he could chase it down, the beaver was weeping her thanks into a large white handkerchief, of all things, and trying to shake his foot in gratitude, and inviting him to tea at the lodge. He almost didn’t go, but for the thought that he could find something nourishing to bring back for Nadeja.

What he found instead was the other beaver. And the news _he_ brought seemed to fill the lodge with sunlight, and made Kirrik’s blood sing in his veins. 


	3. Morning has broken

_"Morning has broken like the first morning._  
_ Blackbird has spoken like the first bird._  
_ Praise for the singing, praise for the morning_  
_ Praise for them springing fresh from the world."_  
\- Eleanor Farjeon, "Morning has broken"

_"The Robin is a Gabriel  
__In humble circumstances—"_  
\- Emily Dickinson

_"How do we know which side that bird is on? Why shouldn't it be leading us into a trap?"  
__"That's a nasty idea. Still—a robin, you know. They're good birds in all the stories I've ever read. I'm sure a robin wouldn't be on the wrong side."  
__\- _C.S. Lewis, _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_

* * *

The first morning in her new nest, Nadeja woke late. At first, she feared she was alone — the nest was cold, as if Kirrik had not been in it for some time. 

Her swiftly beating heart calmed when the crow’s voice drifted down from the holly’s upper boughs.

"Are you worried?" Kirrik asked.

Nadeja was always worried. She didn't think Kirrik had quite grasped that. She feared that, in his eyes, she was like a starry-eyed Centaur — all ancient wisdom and prophecy. Either that or a naïve chick, too young to know how cold the world could be outside the nest.

She was neither. She was only a robin in a holly tree, taking what shelter she could find and fighting to keep hope alive in some small way.

_I'm worried my eggs will never hatch. I'm worried I will never find another mate. I'm worried I won't have enough food for the chicks even if they should hatch. I'm worried there isn't enough food in the whole wood for everyone if spring doesn't come soon. I'm worried Kirrik will leave, now that he can._

Nadeja said none of these things. When the worries came crowding in on her like a flock of starling bullies, all she could do was either fall silent or chatter enough to drown out their mocking cries.

She thought Kirrik understood that much, at least.

He hopped down onto her branch, wings spread wide for balance (or maybe just to show off how far he could stretch them now). In her braver moments, Nadeja wondered whether the crow would have recovered faster if only he had hope of his own, instead of borrowing hers. In her weaker moments, Nadeja feared this small miracle was the only one she would ever be granted.

If so, she decided, it would have to be enough.

"Will you turn the eggs for me?" she asked.

Kirrik had already flown down to the nest and was bending to do so. He turned each egg with his beak while balancing on one foot and using the other to keep the eggs from jostling too hard against each other. (Occasionally they did, and the clack-clack-clack of stone on stone made Nadeja's heart skip and skid like a rock hurled across the ice.)

"I, er," said Kirrik, still balanced awkwardly on one foot.

Nadeja shook herself out of her thoughts, dislodging snow from around her feet. It slid easily off the holly's smooth gray bark and hissed onto the branches below. Nadeja hardly felt the cold these days. Did that mean Narnia was getting warmer? Or was she in danger of freezing to her perch, like mothers always warned their chicks about? Nadeja picked up one foot and held it close to her belly for warmth. She didn't _feel_ stiff or clumsy like Kirrik had been. But perhaps freezing and turning to stone weren't quite the same after all?

"I don’t want you to get your hopes up too high," the crow said all in a rush. Nadeja's eyes darted back to him. "About your… well, I mean, stone doesn’t just… get better.”

“You did,” Nadeja said.

Kirrik tucked his head down and busied himself rearranging the eggs.

_Be here, now_, Nadeja reminded herself, tucking the worries in the back of her mind where they belonged. In this moment, her friend Kirrik was alive and well. So was she. And her eggs, whatever else they may be, were safe from harm.

It would have to be enough.

* * *

The first time Nadeja caught Kirrik listening to songbird gossip, she valiantly refrained from teasing him. She was farther up the tree, collecting another gift of berries from the holly dryad, when she happened to glance down. Kirrik's head was cocked, his neck strained and twisted downward. 

For a crow, he wasn't very surreptitious.

It had been a long time since Nadeja had paid attention to the other birds in the glen. She paused to listen to whatever had absorbed Kirrik, wondering whether she was the subject of the latest gossip (again).

Instead, Bottlebutt the chickadee was hopping about in a frenzy on the ground, going on about a Faun at the far end of the wood. Nadeja found this curious. Since when did Bottlebutt — or any of that crowd — pay attention to anything beyond the borders of their small glade? The Faun was in trouble of some sort, and the chatter sounded worried. Nadeja's heart thumped in her breast.

She felt guilty, but she put it out of her mind. She had enough worries closer to home.

When she returned to the nest, Kirrik said nothing of the Faun or the other birds, so Nadeja held her silence as well. But that was not the last time she caught him eavesdropping on the other songbirds. The more attention he paid to the goings-on below, the more restless he became.

Once, he tried to tell her about it. It had taken him days to work up to it, days in which he was rarely at the nest except to turn the eggs and snatch a few moments of sleep before returning to whatever self-appointed mission took him away from her.

"The Beavers at the dam told the moles, and they're spreading the word underground," he croaked as softly as his crow's voice would allow. "The moles told the mice, of course, and the mice told the squirrels. It was Fiddlebit the squirrel who told Bottlebutt — did you know that busybody chickadee has been helping the squirrel track her acorn cache for _years_? How can squirrels be so absentminded? — anyway, it's all over the wood." Kirrik hunched into his feathers and minced closer to Nadeja. "They say… _Aslan_ is on the move."

For one glorious moment, Nadeja's heart sang within her. She even opened her beak and filled her lungs with sweet, cold air, ready to give voice to that song — and the eggs beneath her rolled ever so slightly. _Clack clack clack_, the sound of stone on stone.

The song died in her throat. 

After that, Kirrik listened even more closely to the other birds' gossip. He began spending more time with the other crows, passing murmured messages and roaming farther and farther abroad. He spent hours at the beavers’ dam, and his talk was filled with maps and trails and vantage points and other things far beyond Nadeja’s ken and cares. He always brought some sort of food back to the nest for her, and he still took his turn sitting on the eggs, but something in his eyes was always far away, now.

For her part, Nadeja closed her eyes and her ears and tried not to hope for any _more_ impossible things.

* * *

The first day that Kirrik did not come back, Nadeja told herself that he must have tired and paused in a friendly tree to pass the night. The second day that Kirrik did not come back, she told herself that he must have journeyed far for the information he sought, and surely would be another day, or even two, returning.

When there was no sign or news of him after four days, she began to worry that the Witch’s stone curse had returned within him, weighing his body and his spirit and making it difficult to travel. The fifth day, it was impossible not to wonder whether his heart had turned to stone instead, and to imagine that he had simply returned to his rookery (he called it a murder, she recalled with a shiver) without another thought for her or her eggs. After all, the insidious thought whispered, crows were only ever loyal to their own kind. In all the stories, whoever trusted a crow?

"I do," Nadeja whispered to herself fiercely to banish the thoughts back to the depths of winter from whence they came.

On the seventh day, Kirrik returned, and in the downdraft of his wings came a breath of warmth and sweet grass and blossom and sunlight.

_Spring_.

* * *

It wasn't until much later that Nadeja learned where her friend had gone. It was enough to have him back, to no longer be alone with her thoughts and the stillness.

But Kirrik, though he spoke only obliquely of his absence, was not content with silence. (After all, he _was_ a crow.)

"Ask me what news." He took a sprig of holly in his beak and poked her, gently. "Ask me. Ask me!"

Still too glad to scold him, she gave in. "Very well, what news? What gossip, I should say, for you have taken to that like a duck to water."

Kirrik shook his head. Had his feathers been so glossy, his eye so bright before he left? "No, I don’t mean foolish songbird gossip, and I don't mean hearsay from an addle-brained squirrel. I have seen _children_ in the wood."

"Children?"

Kirrik bobbed his head so vigorously he had to flap his wings to regain his balance. "I saw them on my way back from… on my way back here. Four of them. By the iron tree with a burning flame."

Nadeja crouched low in her nest. An iron tree, aflame? It sounded terrifying. So why did the thought of it make her dizzy with anticipation?

"_Four human children_," repeated Kirrik. "Don't you know the prophecy?"

It was a silly question, for every Narnian knew the prophecy like they knew the sky above and the ground below. Kirrik was being deliberately provoking (again, he _was_ a crow), and Nadeja did not dignify his question with an answer.

"Are they going to see…" Her voice failed her.

"Aslan?" The longed-for, long-unspoken name came so easily to him. It made Nadeja's heart skip a beat. "They will as soon as you show them the way."

Someone cheeped, like a panicky chick. Faintly, Nadeja thought it might have been her. "_Me_?"

"Who better?" cried Kirrik, forgetting to keep his voice down.

The holly trembled, and Nadeja hushed him frantically. "I can't," she whispered.

Kirrik had the temerity to roll his eyes. "I don't mean all the way to the Stone Table." (Was _that_ where he had been? So _far_?) "Just to the Beavers' dam. They’ll know what to do.”

"I can't!" Nadeja was beginning to get angry. She had not allowed herself to become angry for such a long time, but this… this… crow! had the nerve to leave her alone, with no word, and reappear blithely asking her to leave her nest and play a role that should have gone to a greater, bolder, braver bird. All this time together, and he didn't really know her at all. 

"I'll sit on the nest, of course," said Kirrik, as if that was the only problem with his absurd proposition. He eyed her shrewdly. "If the kings and queens are on their way, then so is spring. What are you afraid of?"

Nadeja puffed herself up indignantly. "I'm not afraid." Even as she said it, she knew Kirrik would hear the lie. How could she have such courage when everything was at its worst, and be so afraid now that all her hopes were on the verge of being fulfilled? For so long, she had believed that it all had a purpose, even if she would never see the good that came of it. Why was she so afraid of her dearest dreams coming true here and now?

She felt like a fledgling, perched precariously on the edge of the nest, hesitating before the first flight. Or first fall. Safer to stay in the nest. Safer for the eggs to remain solid stone than to risk them breaking altogether…

"You go," Nadeja cried, tucking her head under her wing. 

"I'm a crow," Kirrik scoffed. "No one trusts a crow."

"That's not true," she mumbled, her voice muffled by her own feathers.

"I can't hear you," he cawed.

Nadeja poked her head out from under her wing to glare at him. "I trust you," she snapped.

"Good." He looked entirely too satisfied with himself. "Then you'll trust me when I say _you_ should go."

* * *

Afterwards, Nadeja was never quite sure how she ended up perched in an aspen outside a Faun’s cave. But she knew it was Kirrik’s fault.

Worried voices echoed in the cave. Nadeja found herself straining to make out the words, but the few she could hear were hardly reassuring. _Queen_ and _treason_ and _Maugrim..._ and she nearly flew away then and there, but for the four shapes that stepped out from the darkness of the cave.

There _were_ children in the wood.

Nadeja held still, willing her drab brown plumage to blend with the branches and lamenting her bright red breast and the lack of bright red berries to mimic in stillness.

“Go,” cawed Kirrik softly from the treetop. “Go!”

But oh! How the children resembled _Her_.

Pale faces, long legs, bare hands, bodies wrapped in furs not their own.

Nadeja huddled into her feathers, her beak open, panting.

For the first time, she understood the gloomy junco’s stubborn resistance to the very idea of spring. How had she never realized that hope came with so much _fear_?

Even if the children were human, and not some beardless dwarves, some trick of the Witch... even if Aslan had truly returned... even if the endless winter could be vanquished... what would happen to her eggs? Her precious eggs. 

At least stone could not be broken.

Nadeja hid her head under one wing, ashamed of her own thoughts.

The branch shuddered as Kirrik alit next to her. She could not look at him. How could she? That cynical, mocking crow had more faith in her than she had in Aslan! 

“I am too afraid.” Her voice sounded nothing like her own. All the melody had been gone for a long time.

The crow’s beak combed gently through her feathers. “The children do not know that,” he pointed out. “And I, for one, will not tell them.”

Nadeja looked up at her faithful friend. Her own mate had abandoned her, but Kirrik had returned, time and again, to a nest that was not his own and to the very bird responsible for his injury. He had given so much and asked nothing in return... until now. 

“I have seen Aslan,” he whispered. “And He has promised me that all will be well.”

Nadeja never made a conscious decision to leave the safety of the shadows. Suddenly she was in the air, in the sun, in the open. And four hopeful faces looked up at her.

* * *

Anyone who has beem to a proper Wood knows that it is full of noises: the whisper of wind in the trees, the rustle of small animals unseen, the twitter of birds.

Lucy was too young to remember walking in a proper Wood, but Peter knew the sounds that should be there... and weren't. And with every step in the silent snow, he believed a little more in the Witch of whom Lucy had spoken.

Which is why, when the robin appeared, fluttering out of place in her russet coat against an unyielding backdrop of white, Peter's sense of wrongness increased.

Because the robin did not make a sound.

“I think she wants us to follow her,” whispered Lucy.

The bird bobbed her head, and flew to the next tree.

“It’s almost as if it understands us,” marveled Susan. She stepped closer to the robin, who promptly fluttered to the next tree.

Edmund looked meaningfully at Peter. “If it does, then it’s trying to lead us somewhere. How do we know we can trust it?”

Peter swallowed. “It’s a robin,” he said, forcing a cheer he didn’t quite feel. “They’re not winter birds, are they? I can’t imagine one in the service of Lucy’s winter witch.”

“She’s not _my_ witch,” Lucy said adamantly. “And I’m sure we can trust a robin.”

Edmund said nothing.

The bright-eyed robin flew silently to the next tree.

“Come on, then,” said Peter. “We don’t want to lose sight of her.”

* * *

When she reached the clearing Kirrik had described, Nadeja waited until the four children (human children!) were whispering among themselves. Then she darted into a tangle of knotty branches and crouched low out of sight.

“Oh! The robin has flown away!” cried one of the girls.

“Nice one, Peter,” said the smaller boy said, and there was nothing nice about his voice at all. “I suppose we’re well and truly lost now.”

_You’re not lost_, Nadeja wanted to tell them, but before she could gather her courage to leave her hiding place, Mr. Beaver approached the children with a crumpled white handkerchief as a token of friendship.

When they had all tramped off into the woods, presumably heading for the beavers’ dam, Nadeja flew down to their footprints. She sat in one, snow on all sides like a nest, and marveled at the footprints of kings and queens. Even the smallest girl had such big feet! 

For once, the thoughts spinning through her head were not worries to be kept at bay. Instead, she imagined the children entering the beaver’s dam, crossing the river, reaching the Stone Table, bowing before a Lion. In her mind’s eye, Nadeja could see the ice melting away, white snow giving way to white blossoms, bears emerging from their dens and chicks emerging from their eggshells.

For one mad moment, Nadeja contemplated flying after them, following the children and the beavers on their journey. Not just for the adventure, but to make sure and certain everything would end well, like Kirrik said.

Like _Aslan_ said.

Nadeja fluffed her feathers. _Stuff and nonsense_, she told herself sternly. _If Aslan said it would be well, then it shall be well, whether or not you are there to oversee it._

“I told you so,” Kirrik cackled from somewhere far overhead. 

Nadeja would have burst into song, but she didn’t want to dignify his smart remark with a response.

* * *

The subsequent events are told in many tales, songs, chants and histories. Of the children’s adventures, the birds knew little: word reached them of the Witch’s wolves (who were harried and harassed by Kirrik’s murder all the way back to the Witch’s castle), and they heard rumors of Father Christmas. And then no more news from the east came to the Lantern Waste.

Into the silence, Nadeja was the first to sing of spring.

This time, she was not alone.

The three little stones all cracked at once, without warning. Kirrik’s throat worked soundlessly. Nadeja gave a wordless cry. And then the cry was echoed threefold in soft, piping voices, and three wobbly, bedraggled heads poked above their granite-gray broken shells. Refrains of “Mother,” and “Please” and “Hungry” carried on the wind, and for the first time Kirrik wished he could be something other than a crow, so he could join Nadeja’s melody of wordless thanks like all the foolish songbirds in the glen.

And then the murder rose _en masse_ with joyful raucous cries, and Kirrik found his voice.

* * *

The thaw followed soon after, and all of Narnia soon heard of the battle and witnessed true spring. But in the Lantern Waste, in the woods that would come to be known as Beaversdam, the birds already knew.

Even before King Peter earned his knighthood, before Queen Lucy became a healer, before Queen Susan sounded her horn and before King Edmund became Just... before the solemnity of the coronation... a robin named her newborn chicks.

"I present my chicks to the Lord of the Morning," Nadeja said formally. Never before had the words of the rite rang so sweetly in the wood. "Kamen, the first to hatch from stone. Krakat, who cannot be silenced. And Krasa, my small beauty."

The three robin chicks peered up out of their nest, their feathers all bedraggled, their eyes bright. 

"But those are Crows' names," squawked Kirrik, dumbfounded.

"They are names of friendship, loyalty and spring," said Nadeja staunchly. "That makes them Robins' names, too."

Touched, Kirrik hunched his shoulders and grumbled into his feathers.

"What was that?"

"I'll need a Robin's name for my chick, then," he complained, "and they're all so sing-songy. I can’t have my chick named Hopping-through-sunshine or Lilac-breath of—”

“Vira,” piped Nadeja.

Kirrik looked at her suspiciously. “Not bad. But what does it mean?”

Nadeja puffed her breast and reveled in the warmth of the sun. “Faith.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many of the birds’ names are based on Czech words (although I didn’t stick to exact spelling, because names are like that). I do not speak Czech and relied on dictionaries, so any errors are my own!  
Nadeja: Czech, derived from _naděje_, hope  
Perrut: Czech, derived from _peruť_, wing  
Krasa: Czech, beauty  
Kamen: Czech, stone  
Krakat: Czech, caw  
Vira: Czech, faith  
Gryke: English, fissures in limestone slabs created by water.  
Bottlebutt: English, swelling in lower part of a tree trunk


End file.
